What would you like a new teacher to know?

Become culturally competent. Please. Perhaps you already are but there is always more to learn.

Not only culturally but competent in the different learning styles of children.

I get so turned off by teachers who just can’t work with kids of different cultures or learning styles. The learning style also includes kids who are “ADD/ADHD”.

I do remember my first year teacher. I really enjoyed the softness of her. I enjoyed special activities as well. The bad I remember was getting in trouble one time and not understanding at all why. I felt horrible for no reason. In retrospect, I think the teacher was just overwhelmed because I finished my assignment so early and she was trying to help others. She didn’t know what to do with me.

I had a new teacher last year. It sucked. Badly. A suggestion to not suck is if there are any- for lack of a better term -traditions that go on in the grade your are teaching, try to keep them. Because especially in elementary school, kids are going to hear about what happens in, say, third grade, but when they get to third grade they will be very sad when they find out they won’t be doing it.

I once had a new teacher who was too hard on themselves and trying to be perfect. Don’t do that.

I’ll give you an example of what not to do.
Second grade, my teacher refused to let me go to the bathroom [AFTER knowing I had issues that could become serious if I couldn’t go when I needed to.] So. I peed on her chair.
She told my mother that I made her sick just being in her class [before the bathroom incident].
So, I called her out about liking girls and not having a boyfriend at a parent teacher conference.
I was quickly removed from her class.

So. Let kids go to the bathroom, and don’t tell their parents that they make you sick just looking at them.

I was the nerdy student and always hated it when we were told to form groups for a project. I didn’t want to ask and force myself on a group. So I was the kid that was standing in the corner and the teacher would have to single me out and then they would assign me to a group. I feared this.

Count 1,2,3,4 down the rows to assign the groups. Don’t let the kids choose.

@johnpowell Good advice.

As a student:

Act with a certain degree of confidence. You are new, and you don’t exactly know what to do, but don’t be a teacher that constantly says, “Well, I’m not sure how your other teachers do this…what are you used to?...would you like me to…” ad nauseam.

I don’t remember elementary school too well, but (like RedPowerLady said) learn to accommodate different learning styles, because how much kids like elementary school will affect how involved they are in academics later in life. Kids are twitchy and fidgety, so don’t expect them to concentrate too long. Periodically have stretch breaks—one of my teachers did this and it was always very fun for me.

Try to keep the classroom from becoming too cliquey—mix up table groups, force kids to do group projects with people that aren’t their friends. This helps the shy kids, I think, and the whole class gets a little closer because people don’t stay in their own groups.

An addition to what @kyanblue said. Stretch breaks are a great tool. A fact I learned a couple years back. The human brain loses learning capacity (specifically to concentrate and take in new material) after twenty minutes of inactivity. For children this could mean sitting in their chairs for twenty minutes straight. To counter this you must have movement breaks.

kids are people. don’t condescend.

My children had two different first year teachers when she was in elementary school. The first one taught my daughter and she was simply awful. She talked down to parents, refused to be corrected (unless you told her in no uncertain terms in Spanish that she was wrong – if you only spoke English you were up a creek), and lost her temper a lot. You could hear her screaming in the lobby of the school.

She also liked to team up the good students, such as my daughter, with the difficult students, typically boys who couldn’t sit still or who had behavior problems. It dragged my daughter down so much that I finally had to go tell the teacher that if she kept insisting on my daughter doing her job, that she should split her salary. She finally went too far and shoved a kid into the wall. She was transferred to a younger grade. great, so she had even smaller victims

My son, however, had a first year teacher who was a delight. She welcomed parents as partners to her classroom projects and several times during the year devised activities that celebrated the different cultures represented in her class.

She also admitted that she didn’t know much about ADD and other problems and was always happy to read books parents recommended to her or have parent conferences to jointly work out a method of helping students learn. She was a terrific teacher and was on her way to be an even better one, but she was in the reserves and got called up.

When I worked with young children, I broke my lesson plan down into 15 minute sections, scheduled in “designated wiggle times” (everyone would stand up and wiggle everything they had as hard as they could) so the kids could let out excess energy, and always made sure to have several “extra” 5 to 10 minute projects so we could switch mid-stream if the kids lost interest.

Good luck!

I once had a first year teacher who made everything a hands on experience and used real-world correlation. Nothing stimulates learning like the actual use or application of the new knowledge. If you can find a way to use real world examples or activities in whichever subject you can.. you’ll get a great response and have more engaged students.

Also field trips are the shiznit and a great motivator!

@all Wow, I did a load of laundry and came back to 11 responses! Thanks everyone, for giving some great advice and anti-advice. :)

As someone who always had to sit in the front (low vision) and had to go to speech therapy once a week I always liked teachers who didn’t make me feel different from everybody else but always remembered my vision problem so as to not put me in a situation where I couldn’t read something because I was too far away.

It’s nice to create a few “square pegs” for those kids who just can’t seem to stuff themselves into those round holes.

VITAMINS! Wash hands! Everything you think your first year about teaching is 80 percent wrong.
I wish that I’d known how much non-teaching time was involved. It’s not the magical dream I had in my head.

@kikibirdjones ; your avatar LOOKS like a teacher!

@Judi NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Let me guess, somewhere between Kindergarten and third grade?

High School. Art. I win!!!!
That was a special occasion…I usually look like a homeless cat hoarder.

@kikibirdjones ; My daughter who is a high-school English teacher (well, she has worked more as a drama teacher and is now a stay at home mom) is not homeless, but she is a cat hoarder.

Awwww. Yay hoarders!